As 30% of Japan’s temples risk disappearance by 2040, monks are using AI to help people speak with Buddha

According to estimates, 30% of temples in Japan may disappear by 2040. The cause of the event will not be some extravagant sci-fi catastrophe or a predicted public uprising but the decrease in religiosity. Against this backdrop, it seems monks in the country have turned to shake hands with AI and use it to turn more people towards Buddhism while also helping them out spiritually, according to a report by The Japan Times.At Ganshuji temple in the city of Odawara, Kanagawa Prefecture, resident monk Souou Iwayama has pioneered a change. During the pandemic, he introduced an online zazen service as companies shifted to remote work and transformed the temple cemetery into one centred on jumokuso, a form of burial in which cremated remains are interred beneath trees, shrubs or flowers rather than a stone monument requiring expensive maintenance. At the time he took over the management of the temple some years ago, it relied on just four danka for support. Today, more than 550 families use the burial plots, helping rebuild the temple’s finances and broaden its parish base amid wider demographic decline.Not just operational changes, he has also begun integrating AI into the temple’s daily operations, using it to manage memorial schedules and refine written materials for parishioners. “Rather than seeing AI as a threat, we as monks must consider how it can be incorporated into our own efforts at propagation,” he said. “The central question is whether robots or AI can take over our role. But that is not a simple matter.”“When someone dies, and you hold their hand like this, telling them it will be all right, that moment matters,” he said. “There’s something essential in a human presence, where body and mind come together in an instant. That, too, is what it means to be a religious practitioner. I don’t imagine that being replaced.”

No single doctrine

In the West, the Catholic Church has given a formal response to the rise of AI. In a doctrinal note, the Vatican drew a clear distinction between human and artificial intelligence, emphasising that AI must remain subject to human judgment and respect human dignity.In Japan, however, there has been little coordinated response among religious institutions. Religion itself in the country is not a major driving force. A long-running survey by the Institute of Statistical Mathematics offers insight into how people in Japan view religion. One question asks whether respondents have any religious belief. In the most recent survey, conducted in 2018, 26% said they did, while 74% said they did not, a ratio that has remained largely unchanged since 1958. Another question asks whether having a “religious spirit” is important. Here, 57% said yes, compared to 24% who said no.Practices such as Shinto weddings and Buddhist funerals are widely observed but understood as part of everyday life, customs rather than expressions of piety. That overlap is evident in the Agency of Cultural Affairs’ annual statistical research on religion, which shows that as of Dec. 31, 2024, there were approximately 86 million adherents of Shinto and 80 million of Buddhism. Combined, the total exceeds Japan’s population by roughly 47 million.AI taking up as a quasi-spiritual presence may not feel as disruptive in Japan. “If someone said AI was a kind of god, it might just be seen as one more added to the many,” said Takako Inoue, a Tokyo-based antique art dealer to the outlet, referring to the concept of yaoyorozu no kami, or “8 million deities,” the belief that gods are present in everything.

A chance to speak to Buddha

More than two and a half millennia ago, when Buddha was alive, he is said to have answered questions from his followers, offering them guidance and clearing their doubts. After his death, that exchange became impossible. His teachings were preserved instead in scriptures, compiled, transmitted and interpreted across generations, but the immediacy of dialogue was lost.“For 2,500 years, we haven’t been able to speak with the Buddha,” said Seiji Kumagai, a Buddhist priest and professor at Kyoto University’s Institute for the Future of Human Society. “So from a Buddhist historical perspective, our project can be understood as a partial realisation of that aspiration to be able to talk to the Buddha.” Kumagai and Teraverse CEO Toshikazu Furuya began exploring how to build a system capable of responding to questions based on Buddhist texts. The aim was to apply Buddhist ideas about happiness to contemporary life and address people’s anxieties.Drawing on the Sutta Nipata, one of the oldest surviving collections of the Buddha’s discourses, the team released an initial version of the “BuddhaBot” in 2021. Built using Google’s Sentence-BERT algorithm and trained in a question-and-answer format, it responded using passages drawn directly from Buddhist scriptures. While it could retrieve relevant texts based on semantic similarity, it struggled to sustain natural conversation. More recent versions include an upgraded “BuddhaBot-Plus” introduced in 2023. The team later introduced “Shinran-Bot,” modelled on Shinran, the founder of Japan’s largest Buddhist sect, and “Vasubandhu-Bot,” based on the influential Mahayana thinker Vasubandhu. They have also developed augmented-reality interfaces enabling multimodal interaction through text, sound and visual avatars. In February, the team unveiled a humanoid “Buddharoid” equipped with BuddhaBot-Plus, adding a physical dimension to what had previously been a purely digital exchange.“For now, the robot is presented more as a demonstration of what is possible,” Kumagai said. “As costs continue to fall and performance improves, it may become feasible for AI-powered robots to take on parts of Buddhist rituals. But the basic stance should remain that humans are central, with AI and robots playing supporting roles.”While no religious institution in Japan has formally requested to adopt BuddhaBot, Bhutan seems interested. In the country where Buddhist institutions remain closely tied to public life, officials are exploring its use in educational and religious settings. Pilot programs have already placed the technology in the hands of monks, and discussions are underway about wider deployment under clerical supervision.

Shinto poses a difficulty

While Buddhism’s long textual traditions can be translated into AI systems, the situation with Shinto is different. With little emphasis on doctrine, it has historically valued practice over scripture and experience over explanation. Ritual, gesture and presence, rather than verbal instruction, carry meaning. Thus, the idea of a Shinto chatbot is extremely limited.“There are aspects of Shinto and other religions that cannot be captured as data,” said Taishi Kato, a Shinto priest at Hattori Tanjingu shrine in Osaka about artificial intelligence. “I do use it when organising materials,” Kato says, pointing to its value for administrative and informational tasks. At the same time, Kato does not frame AI as inherently dangerous. Drawing on a worldview in which reality is constantly changing and not rigidly divided into good and evil, he suggests that Shinto has historically absorbed new phenomena rather than rejecting them outright. Still, he cautions against simplistic interpretations, such as treating AI as one of the “8 million deities.”

A thin line

The entire playing field is extremely tricky. A June 2025 survey by advertising giant Dentsu of 1,000 regular users of conversational AI ages 12 to 69 found 64.9% of respondents share their emotions with AI, placing it on par with close relationships such as friends or even mothers, positioning it as a kind of “third companion.” Trust levels were also high: 86% said they trust conversational AI, particularly younger users in their teens and 20s. This could mean steering a population away from traditional religion and establishing AI bots as the source of it all.AI systems could be misused to steer users toward particular beliefs or to lend religious authority to individuals or groups seeking influence or profit. In Japan, these concerns resonate against the backdrop of past incidents involving groups such as doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo. Even without malicious intent, errors or distortions in generated responses could mislead users.“The important thing is that there are real human beings in the loop,” Kumagai said. “As long as I, the creator, keep saying, ‘It’s not the Buddha,’ I don’t think there’s a problem. But once I’m gone, if people start saying (AI) is the Buddha, it may be hard to deny, and that’s a risk.”